


Heir Apparent

by Omnicat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Captivity, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Forced Pregnancy, Fuck Or Die, Hopeful Ending, Impregnation, Lemon, Rey Nobody, Space Viagra, Woman on Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-04-07 11:10:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19083820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: Rey had grown up salvaging starship wrecks and picking clean the corpses to survive. Bringing new life into the world to survive shouldn’t be any more harrowing, she reasoned. But that was before she factored in having to look Ben in the eye while they conceived that life.





	Heir Apparent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yujacheong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yujacheong/gifts).



> This fic got away from me a little, but I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Still groggy from the bacta treatments, they had been deposited in a set of rooms more opulent than any place Rey had ever set foot in. It was nothing like the brutal austerity she associated with the First Order and therefore the Empire, like everything comfortable or pleasant had been cut away with angry slashes of a knife. There were plush chairs and couches, tables with crystalline transparisteel tops showing off their intricately carved hover-frames, thick, deep carpets, flower arrangements, sculptures, holo-art, tapestries, and riches disguised as utilitarian items hidden in every drawer and cabinet.

Of course, beneath the carpet was a solid durasteel slab that delivered a wicked electric shock when touched by anything but the underside of the carpet, the gleaming polish of the metal walls and ceiling was no better, there were no windows, and the only door in or out was framed by cameras and an automatic blaster array. It was a prettily gilded cage, but very much a cage.

And the inability to touch the Force that Rey had, at first, taken as a side-effect of the bacta, never went away. Rey shook it off and went on with her days. She’d lived without any awareness of the Force nearly her whole life; she could do it again. The world may feel and look and even _taste_ a little off, but it was nothing she hadn’t gone through before, when her power first came bursting to the surface.

But Ben seemed truly diminished. Rey couldn’t help but think of the stories his mother had told her, of coming home from long days or weeks at the senate to find his toys in impossible places, and watching him absentmindedly twirl his writing utensils through the air with no hands while doing homework, and how he always seemed to know when she and Han had fought somewhere well out of his earshot, and always heard even the words they didn’t say when they argued with _him_. Did he even remember what reality looked like when time, space, and people had hard physical boundaries and the currents of the Force didn’t cause everything to bleed into everything else?

It took long days of stumbling lethargy before he was anything like the Ben she knew. Rey had been the one who tore the room to pieces in a fit of pique deep into their first night. Ben had merely watched, eyes dull and disoriented. He almost cut his feet on the debris more dan once before droids came to clean up and replace everything she’d broken.

Their only glimpses of the world outside their painted prison were the trice-daily droid delivery of food and drink, along with a daily repetition of the command the Emperor had given them when they were locked in here.

Rey and Ben both ignored that.

They ignored it so hard that after the first few days, they would barely even look at each other. The one bed in the apartment was meant for two, but they’d agreed on the first day that one of them would sleep on the bed and the other on the couch, and they’d alternate between them every night. And that was the end of that.

They wouldn’t. Screw Palpatine. They _wouldn’t_.

That’s what Rey told herself until the night Palpatine came to repeat his commands in person.

"It has come to my attention that you two have so far failed to fulfill your tasks even once," the odious creature drawled. The body he wore looked too youthful and fresh-faced to be radiating such potent malevolence. It was palpable even without access to the Force.

"Wrong time of the month," Rey snapped.

She was on her feet, taking a step away for every one Palpatine advanced. Ben, meanwhile, had all but collapsed into one of the comfortable chairs. Out of resignation or despair or plain apathy she couldn’t tell from his bleak face, but she wanted to yell at him for it.

"Perhaps, perhaps not. But I did not come here for excuses, lies, or stalling tactics," Palpatine said.

He continued to circle the room as he spoke, following along in Rey’s wake. He was playing with her, she realized full well, and there was nothing she could do about it. Fine. Let him think her playing along meant she was giving in. She’d show him.

"I came here for results. I feel I have been exceedingly patient with you two. That’s not a complaint. I learned the value of patience a very, very long time ago. I gave you time to realize your helplessness, to accept the futility of your struggle. I gave you time to adjust to each other’s presence and admit to yourselves how much you want this. I gave you time to appreciate all that you can have if you but obey. However..."

Ben, whose only movement so far had been following them with his eyes, visibly tensed.

"What I also learned a long time ago... is that there are quicker ways than waiting."

Ben closed his eyes and balled his fists – and quick as a flash, Palpatine whirled around, raised one hand toward him, and let loose a torrent of unnatural lightning. A scream tore its way through Ben’s clenched teeth, his spine arching, and within moments he had writhed his way out of the comfortable chair and onto the floor.

"No!" Rey cried, only a heartbeat before Ben yelled, "Don’t!"

It took Rey a moment to realize, though, that he hadn’t implored Palpatine, as she had: he’d said it to _her_.

_Don’t give in._

Their thoughts and hearts were lost to each other without the Force, but she could hear his voice in her head clearly even as his physical voice cracked on a scream that seemed to go on forever.

"Ah..." Palpatine sighed in satisfaction, and the lightning finally stopped. "So predictable. Skwalkers all have the same weakness. As do you wannabe Jedi."

Despite every instinct telling her not to take her eyes off the predator, Rey couldn’t stop staring at Ben, face down and wheezing on the stupid carpet. Palpatine stepped over his twitching legs and plucked something from between the cushions of his chair. An aurodium knife with a crystal handle. One of the many pointless little treasures livening up their prison.

Palpatine chuckled. "Foolish boy. Only xonkeys and idiots stub their toes on the same stone twice."

It hadn’t been apathy or defeat that kept Ben so passive. He’d been trying to lull Palpatine into a false sense of security so he’d come within stabbing range, just as he’d tricked Snoke. Rey’s urge to yell at him was overrun by a surge of hope – and a desire to cry.

"Young Skywalker." Palpatine shook his head and smiled, all smug, gloating satisfaction as he watched Ben try to pull himself together. "Your grandfather was a disappointment in the end. Your mother? Immeasurable potential, but she’s too stubborn to put her to use now. Your uncle – well, it must be galling to have lived so long in abject terror of him, to have experienced so much anguish and hatred, but to know deep down that he could never have gone through with what he tried to do to you. And you... no, I don’t think that’ll work out either. Because you never did learn to _accept_ your pain, did you? You play at embracing the Dark Side of the Force, but when it comes down to it, your hurt and rage and fear still only weaken you when they _should_ grant you strength. Such a pity. A whole bloodline created for a single purpose, and none of them are up to the task. You’re not suited to the Dark Side, Ben Solo. And yet... you are nothing if _not_ uniquely suited to it."

He grabbed the back of Ben’s head and lifted him up with supernatural ease. At first Ben just looked confused. Then he screamed, like nothing Rey had heard before. Before had been screams of pain, simple and animalistic in their awfulness. But these screams raised the hairs on her arms because even without the Force, Rey could tell something far, far worse was happening. Something fundamental about his presence in the Force was being altered, torn apart with a brutality she would have found unthinkable before now, and every atom in Ben’s body was aware of how wrong it was.

When Rey tried to move, she found herself immobile. She could only watch as Palpatine did something her senses had been dulled to, and Ben suffered for it.

Palpatine cackled. "That old fool did such a marvelous job preparing you for this. You feel it, don’t you? The power of the Dark Side, seeping into every crack of your broken, conflicted self. Taking for itself what you’ve always refused to give. Go ahead and fight it; your resistance will only make it stronger."

Then he let go, and Ben dropped like a sack of scrap metal.

"Children not shaped by their upbringing are a rare breed," Palpatine said lightly. "I am one of the very few I’ve encountered in my lifetime, and I admit, it has sometimes made me blind to the importance of child-rearing. The mistake I made with Anakin was to let his mother keep him and his life play out as it would for as long as I did, to only begin shaping him in earnest when his power was already honed and harnessed. Snoke thought he was so clever, inserting himself into your life from the start, but still he followed in my footsteps. And look what a worthless mess it made of you. Try to have both and you’ll get neither."

A white-hot flash of rage shot through Rey, like thunder in the distance. Far more present, though, was fear. For Ben _and_ of Ben. What had that monster done to him? What was it he thought the Dark Side had just managed to take away that years of manipulation and trauma and Ben’s own wild, blind hacking away at the concepts of right and wrong hadn’t been able to? And to what end?

"This time, I will follow the Jedi example," Palpatine went on, placing the knife on a dresser and turning his back to it without a care in the world. "A child raised isolated from any unwanted influences, immersed only in those traits and energies you desire for it – it will know nothing else and therefore choose nothing else. Prune its experiences and restrict its avenues for growth thoroughly enough, and a child raised thus will never know true hatred, or passion – or peace, or compassion. Whichever."

Palpatine grinned, and it made him look more like a shriveled, twisted old man than his smooth face should have allowed.

"Do not despair, Kylo Ren. Your efforts, futile though they may seem, will at last bear fruit in your offspring. Now, then." Palpatine snapped his fingers. "A choice for you lovebirds. One delivery of seed from Ben’s loins to Rey’s womb every night, or – death."

Ben’s body rose from the floor. His head lifted. His face was slack and his eyes vacant, as if he wasn’t really there inside. Vacant – and a lurid, inflamed, red-rimmed gold. It looked diseased, infected, parasitical. It made Ben’s pallid, loose features look corpse-like.

Rey’s paralysis ended without warning. She let herself fall, too busy staring.

"Ben?"

The thing with Ben’s face lunged for her. Instinctively, she dodged and kicked, but it was no use. He had her by the throat, his reflexes Force-fast, his entire weight bearing down on her. How had she never realized how _heavy_ that huge lunk of a man would be? Her mouth opened in a futile gasp. She pulled at the wrists suddenly in her grip with all her strength, while she still had it, but it wasn’t enough. She bucked her hips and jammed her knees into whatever parts of his body they could reach, and got nowhere. Those horrible, unnatural, swollen golden irises stared down at her without blinking. Crazed, teeth bared, and possessed, the creature trying to kill her was nigh-unrecognizable.

Rey’s lungs were screaming and her eyes rolling in her head. Somewhere far away, someone said, "Killed, as one might say, with the cruelest stroke," and cackled, harder and harder and then softer and softer, muahahahahahaha, drowning out her own choking and grunting and the Ben-thing’s snarling breaths and... and...

Air.

Weightlessness.

Rey drew in huge, wheezing breaths and dragged, then crawled, then stumbled away from the dark shape that was Ben. It did not follow her. When she finally looked back at him, a crystal decoration the size of her arm held up in a clumsy, haphazard defensive position, he was backed up against a dresser filled with liquors and glassware, half-hanging on it, like he’d taken just as much of a beating and could barely keep himself upright. His eyes were huge – and brown. He looked horrified.

"Ben?" she rasped. "Is that you?"

His mouth opened and closed. His jaw worked. "I don’t know how to answer that question."

Rey did. Palpatine had left the apartment, but he’d left part of his will behind.

In Ben.

Puppet strings of Dark energy, strung through his veins like serpents, waiting to strike, and take over control of his body, and then strike at _her_. But waiting for what? Palpatine’s demands were clear, as were his methods. He didn’t expect Rey to attack and violate Ben any time soon, and he wouldn’t repeat Snoke’s mistake of trying to push and cajole Ben into a decision either. But how much or how little rebellion, or resistance, or even mere reluctance, would it take to set off this – this curse, this abomination?

Visibly shaken, Ben looked down at his hands. Rey could have sworn his mouth was forming words, but no sound came from his throat.

A venomous trail of doubt wormed its way into Rey’s own heart. Were these drastic measures really necessary to get Ben to cooperate? Or was the threat of no longer getting to make the choice himself enough to finally push him over the edge and commit to the Dark path once and for all?

Then he clenched his fists and looked up. "I couldn’t stop it. You’ll have to kill me."

Rey’s jaw dropped. "What? No!"

"There’s no other way now, Rey," he said with infuriating calm. "If we don’t have sex with each other, I’ll try to kill you. And if you don’t kill me first, eventually I’ll succeed. If for no other reason than you holding back."

"He won’t kill us, he wants us to conceive a child. He had us as good as dead once already, and he threw us in his bacta tanks and locked us in here. He needs us alive," she reasoned.

"No he doesn’t. From day one, he could have had us killed, scraped our blood off the walls, and created the child he wants in a laboratory. He’s keeping us alive because it’s more fun for him, or he thinks we might be useful for something other than this after all if he can break us, or I don’t know. But he doesn’t _need_ us to live through this."

"Then you have to fight it! You’ll never kill me if we’re _both_ fighting to keep that from happening."

"I _did_ fight it."

"I know you can do better!"

A mess of unhappy emotions tangled up Ben’s face. "Can I really? For how long?"

"Dammit, Ben, I don’t want to kill you!"

Rey tossed her crystal weapon aside. It smashed against the nearest wall amidst a shower of sparks. Ben surged forward as if provoked.

"And I don’t want to kill _you!_ I don’t even want to hurt you! I give up, I _don’t_ , okay, dammit! It – you –"

He waved his arms as if that would tell her what his words couldn’t, until they fell, in jolting stages. Like the Imperial Star Destroyer that had stood upright like a beacon in the desert when Rey was a very young girl, until one day everyone in Niima Outpost turned to stare and point and yell because it had finally collapsed under its own weight and damage. Ben looked and sounded, if possible, even more like a wreck.

"I can’t do it again. Not again." The look in his eyes said he could fall to his knees and beg at any moment. "Please don’t make me."

"Then _don’t_ hurt me," Rey said simply. She found her voice shaking and, to her own surprise, her choice made. "We can – we can make it good."

‘It.’ _That._ Palpatine’s demand that they produce a Force-strong heir for him. Rey would’ve done anything not to name it, but that window had passed.

It:

Sex.

Cautiously, as if he were a skittish animal, she approached Ben and took his hand. "Right?"

Ben swallowed thickly, his eyes searching her face. "I wouldn’t know. I’ve never done it before."

Well, damn. Here she’d been hoping.

"I’ve... done it more than _never_ , so by the rules of seniority that puts me in charge."

With that, she nodded, and nodded again, decisively. Then she started undoing her belt.

"Take off your pants." A beat. "And your tunic."

He looked faintly scandalized. "I don’t think we need my chest for sex."

"You don’t. I do. Here, this is for you." Letting her sashes fall from her shoulders, Rey pulled her shirt up over her head and undid her breast binding. She wanted to hunch her shoulders and hide, but no, she would not. Fake it ’till you make it. She pushed down her pants and underwear in one fell swoop. "To help you get it up. Now show me yours so I can get wet for this."

But Ben didn’t look like her nudity was helping. Quite the opposite. He shifted from foot to foot, hands clenching and unclenching; ill at ease. His expression didn’t look as murderous as he must have liked. But then, when did it ever? The helmet had been the right decision. Nobody could tell you were gnawing on the inside of your cheek from behind a mask, and Ben looked like he couldn’t have _stopped_ gnawing if his life depended on it.

Dammit.

"Get on the bed," Rey said, mouth dry.

With a face fit for an execution, he complied.

Rey closed her eyes as if that could stop the words she was about to say from being real. "With your pants _off_ , Ben."

Cloth rustled, and when Rey opened her eyes again, Ben was bent double and threw his pants over the far edge of the bed. Slowly, reluctance having rusted his joints, he straightened and lay back, fully bared to her.

 _No tan lines anywhere,_ was Rey’s first, borderline hysterical thought. His paleness made him look vulnerable and tender, like a fruit freshly peeled from its protective pod, now at the mercy of unforgiving elements and too-harsh touch alike.

Her second thought was that he was flaccid, and limp dicks didn’t make babies. She approached the bed, leaned on it with one hand, and reached the other out toward him. He slapped it away before she could touch him.

"What are you doing?!"

"We can’t do what he wants with you like this."

"I can produce my own erections."

He cupped his business protectively. After a long moment of furious staring and no movement, he curled up with his back to her. Only then did he lick one of his hands, take his shaft, and start tugging on it.

Rey stared. And stared. She stared until one of them, she couldn’t even have said who, drew a breath that was unexpectedly louder than the others. Snapping out of it, she turned away. The soft sounds of flesh working flesh filled the room and all her senses. Her heart beat wildly. Her mouth was dry, but... _another_ part of her was not. Damn the situation they were in, damn right and wrong, damn whatever she felt for Ben, damn however _he_ was feeling; doing this, knowing _what_ he was doing to himself was making her wet.

"Can I join you yet?" she asked after what felt like what should have been more than enough time.

It took a while before he mumbled an answer. "It’s not working."

Rey shivered from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. "Let – let me."

She turned around, beseeching him with her eyes. Trying and failing not to emote a dozen incoherent things at once, he nodded.

She crawled onto the bed and knelt beside him as he straightened onto his back. She kept her knees pressed together at first, but after a moment’s thought, spread them wide and brought one hand to her clit even as the other cradled Ben’s soft, warm cock.

"Wait."

He snatched up her hand. But this time he didn’t remove it, just brought it to his mouth to lick it.

"It’s bet– it works better this way," he muttered, not looking at her.

Rey licked her lips and gripped him again. This time, she let neither of them stop her from pumping him. Or from sliding two fingers down between her pussy lips, looking for the bundle of nerves she wanted. She moved her hands in tandem, one hand on herself and one on him. Ben refused to look – until her arousal became audible, slick little sounds for every pass of her fingers up and down along the protrusion of her clit. His eyes went wide. His mouth parted. His cock swelled in Rey’s hand, and in turn, she got wetter.

"Rey..."

He looked up, disbelief in every line of his face.

Rey swallowed (out of nerves or excitement she wasn’t sure), answered _"Ben"_ , took the hand closest to her, and brought it between her thighs. Barely slowing down her attention to her clit, she raised herself up a little higher on her knees and fit his hand below her own, against the rest of her sex. His breath hitched. He twitched his fingers, then stopped, uncertain of his welcome. Rey nodded. So he gently ran his fingers along her folds, feeling out the shape and make of her and sliding through her slickness.

"Go on. Put one in," Rey breathed, studying his face with rapt attention.

His exploration of her became more intent as one of his fingers crooked. It burrowed between her folds and rubbed back and forth, searching for the dip that would let him in. His hesitation slowed him down, but once he found it, he pressed inward.

His fingers were as large and thick as the rest of him, but Rey’s arousal was bigger and slicker, and he slipped in easily. Her finger passed over her clit, her muscles clenched, and the resulting jolt of pleasure made her breath come short. She took hold of his cock again as a reward.

"Pump it."

He obeyed, and slowly but surely, he relaxed from his corpse-like ‘lie back and think of Coruscant’ position, curling toward her and sitting up. A tension in Rey’s chest eased. Her body hadn’t cared, but she’d hated how obviously he’d hated her touch. His face was still a battlefield of tension and aversion versus hope and lust, but this was better. Maybe this way, she could at least pretend they were doing this willingly.

He brushed his thumb against the fingers working her clit. "Can I?"

Maybe, he even felt the same way.

Rey nodded, cupped his cheek with her sticky hand, and leaned in to kiss him. Every part of him she touched shuddered and heaved, but he pressed closer, kissed back harder.

"Rey, I –" he panted.

"What?"

All of him stilled. He looked at her very seriously. Too seriously.

"Tell me why you’re doing this," he demanded quietly. "Putting in the unnecessary effort. Is this what you think I need to do my part, or is this what you want to do? I need to know."

"Why?"

"Emperor Palpatine rising from the dead to make us breed him the ultimate, unsullied Force wielder wasn’t exactly how I imagined this happening while we were apart."

Rey’s heart went into overdrive. _He doesn’t want to hurt you,_ she told herself over and over, but every time, it was countered with: _He didn’t last time when it was Snoke trying to use us against each other either, and look how that turned out._ He’d been torn between the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force for as long as she’d known him. Killing his father hadn’t cemented his devotion to one and saving her from his master hadn’t swayed him to the other. Would this be any different? And even if it was – would it lead to the change she wanted? Who was to say that once he got used to the two of them fucking, he wouldn’t decide being imprisoned and forced into sexual slavery by Palpatine was the destiny he’d always sought?

He’d drawn stranger conclusions in the past!

No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t give him the answer he wanted. Not when it might blow up in her face again. Not without the Force to connect them.

"You say ‘apart’ as if we were ever together," Rey forced out.

Ben’s lips parted, his jaw worked, and then his whole face clenched up.

"Needless cruelty is not in my nature," she added, stiff-lipped and with her nose turned up. "And I don’t hate you enough to partake in it out of spite. That’s the reason why."

Weighing, or perhaps wrestling, every word, he said: "That. Is. A. Lie."

"Keep telling yourself that."

"Either you take pleasure in the suffering of others, which I would count as needless cruelty, or you take pleasure in _me_." He janked his hand away from her – his finger out of her. She winced. He held up his slick-shining hand. "Though I suppose a _Jedi_ could get like this off of nothing but her own holier-than-thou self-righteousness."

Letting go of his cock, she slapped him.

"I _wanted_ you, when we were connected on the island, when I came to your ship. Want _ed_ , Ben. Past tense."

"You mean you wanted the man Snoke’s false vision told you I could be if you played the part of the brave, pure, Light-sided hero right," he spat.

"No, I wanted the man _I_ knew, based on nothing but the two of us, you could be. But you chose not to be him, so I left, and the wanting left me."

"And that’s why you’re now shoving your tongue down my throat and letting me stick my fingers in you instead of taking care of yourself like I did."

"Dammit, Ben!" Rey wanted to shake him, or cry, or both. "As long as you belong to the Dark Side, you can’t belong to me. That’s an allegiance I won’t share you in."

There was that funeral face of his again. The one he got when he looked at all his worst choices, tried not to cry, and told himself it was for the best, or there was no other way, or destiny had demanded it, or a hundred other lies supplied by his self-loathing about why it was too late to turn over a new leaf. And indeed:

"Then you should’ve staked your claim sooner. A lot sooner. Because the Darkness doesn’t share _or_ let go."

Would shaking him and hitting his sides until the loose screws in his head randomly rattled into place work, she wondered? It worked for starship salvage and droids. Why _wouldn’t_ it work for this thick-headed bolts-for-brains?

"Now _that’s_ a lie," Rey said, halfway between a laugh and a sob. "The Dark Side has no more power over us than the Light Side. It’s what we do with both sides that matters."

"What would you know about the Dark Side?"

"You think I _don’t_ know the Dark Side? You think I haven’t walked the ‘paths’ to it my entire life? Anger, suffering, confusion – they were inescapable. The difference is I never climbed into bed with them."

"Not all of us are fit for that flawless, untouchable Jedi mold," Ben choked out. "Not all of us can live starved of love and still believe in something that doesn’t –"

He cut himself off harshly. One moment he was in her face, the next he was stalking off. He sucked in a breath that sounded like a sob and rubbed his face so roughly Rey wouldn’t be surprised if he turned around and his nose was bleeding.

He made it until the doorway.

His body jolted, his breath hitched audibly, he stumbled. And then he turned with the fluidity of some inhuman predator, a gait wholly unnatural to him, and his dark eyes were golden.

Oh no. Not again.

Rey rolled, putting the bed between them. This time, with time to prepare, she cast about for a weapon. She was a mean opponent with a staff or without, but Ben had a lot of weight in muscle on her. Plus, as he’d pointed out, the element of unflinching, mindless malevolence.

The walls. She could stun him by throwing him into one of the electrified walls.

Ben took a running leap across the bed. Rey backed away, and he followed – and stumbled. His eyes blinked furiously. Rey quickly darted in and rammed her shoulder into his solar plexus. Change of plans, if you could even call a decision made and unmade so quickly plans: she followed him as he stumbled backwards, wheezing and bent nearly double, grabbed him by the throat, and threw him not into the wall but onto the bed.

"Stay down!" She climbed on top of him and held him down by the shoulders as his eyes – shimmered, was the only way to describe it. As if one moment his eyes were truly gold, and the next, it was only a trick of the light, and another moment later, they’d never been anything but brown in the first place. "Stay down and fuck me. Or let me fuck you, at least!"

Ben squeezed his eyes shut. "I can’t do this," he rasped. "I can’t keep it up for – for _this_."

Rey couldn’t bear to look at him either. "Ben, I –"

Something pounded into the mattress so hard both of their bodies bounced. With a jolt, Rey opened her eyes. Ben’s balled fist had been the culprit, and as she watched he did it again, and again. Of course it would’ve been him. But for some reason, she was still surprised by the outburst. Caustic and fatalistic she’d gotten used to during their ill-fated ‘let’s defeat Palpatine together’ truce and the joint incarceration that followed, but he hadn’t once lashed out like that. With a choked scream, he slammed his head back into the mattress.

"Palpatine couldn’t even leave us a bottle of pills?!"

That gave Rey pause. "...what pills?"

He stopped his pummeling to cover his face, no less aggressively. "Aphrodisiacs. Arousal aids."

 _"Oh,"_ Rey groaned. She could’ve sunk under the sand right then and there, lack of sand be damned. "He did leave some of those."

"What?!" Ben’s eyes flew open.

"I found them the first night and hid them," she confessed. "I didn’t recognize the name. I thought it would be best not to let you get your hands on an unknown substance to do who knows what with."

With one hand, Ben pinched the bridge of his nose. With the other, he made a ‘gimme’ motion. Rey climbed off him, took a pill from the bottle in its hiding place behind the linens in the cupboard, and pressed it into Ben’s hand. There was a jug of water on the night stand. He ignored it and swallowed his pill dry. Her mood thoroughly ruined, Rey took one herself too, _with_ water.

Backs to each other, sitting on opposite edges of the bed, they waited for the drug to kick in. It was a strange sensation, to feel her nipples harden, her belly warm, and her nethers swell and throb, to get so wet she worried about staining the sheets, and yet to feel nothing but gut-wrenching sorrow in her chest. Rey didn’t like it.

She didn’t like the thought of it working on Ben either. Nor the thought that he _needed_ it to work.

"I’m ready," he said.

He shuffled to the middle of the bed, laid his head on a pillow, and stared at the ceiling. His cock jutted outrageously from between his tense thighs, his clenched fists. Rey straddled him, guided his cock to her cunt, and sat. No fanfare, no delay, no nothing. Even the breathtaking stretch of his intrusion didn’t stir any excitement or investment, let alone joy.

The drug was certainly effective, though. She opened right up to his thick cock, and it felt _good_. Her mind felt divorced from her body and Ben was wincing and clutching the sheets in something that was clearly _not_ enjoyment, but at least a thrill of pleasure shot up her spine with every movement.

Both of their spines, Rey reminded herself. She wasn’t hurting Ben, no matter how pinched his expression and uneven his breathing may be. His erection was rock-solid. The drug was working its magic in his system too. Of course he didn’t want it like _this_ – she didn’t either – but what other choice did they have?

She experimentally wriggled her hips, feeling the way it moved the cock inside her and set her nerves alight with pleasure. It was so strange, being so responsive, feeling stuffed so full. She wished she could have discovered this novelty under better circumstances. But there was nothing to be done about it now. So she lifted herself up on her knees, off of Ben and his cock, until he threatened to slip out of her, and then lowered herself again. That felt good too. Felt like _more_.

She repeated that move, turned it into a rhythm. Up and down, in and out, his hot, thick presence inside dragging deliciously along the walls of her cunt. She tilted her hips and arched her back until she found the perfect angle, the best friction, mouth falling open and eyes slipping closed. So good. So full. If only – no, no thinking about that, only about the bounce of her hips. Pleasure washed over her like a wave, cresting; she would have called it an orgasm if not for the continued need to keep going, get more, go harder. Digging her knees into the mattress, she thrust herself down onto Ben’s cock, again and again, pushing the wave higher every time. The pleasure crashed into her so fiercely she buckled under its weight, throwing out her arms to brace herself and finding her hands colliding with Ben’s chest with a smack and a jolt. Her eyes shot open.

He had one arm thrown over his eyes, the other hanging on white-knuckled and bracing to the sheets. His jaw was clenched and his lips were pulled back in a grimace. There was no way he wasn’t just as affected by the pleasure as she was, but she couldn’t have said it from the look of him.

Closing her eyes to reality again, Rey braced herself on Ben’s shoulder and brought her hand between her legs to probe for her clit. This would either be the best or the worst thing she’d ever do to herself. There – that was the spot, that was where to rub, where to press, where to –

"Fuck!" she spat, as if it were punched out of her. Every muscle from her knees to her neck seized up in release, great, rippling surges of it that had her curling in on herself while she rubbed furiously and her brow pressed to Ben’s heart and his hand was on her neck or her face and fuuuuuuuck.

The best thing. The greatest, most planet-shattering, horrible thing.

Rey caught her breath, blinking overwhelmed moisture from her lashes. When she looked up, Ben was staring at her.

" _Force,_ " she swore breathlessly. "Did you – ?"

"No."

"What do you mean, ‘no’? _I_ did."

"Different people’s orgasms are completely unrelated events in human biology," he ground out, glaring as if blaming her for making him say that out loud.

"Dammit."

Her arms shook, her abs shook, her thighs shook. Rey refused to be stupid and try to push them beyond such obvious limits, so she collapsed her whole weight on Ben’s chest.

"I thought men were supposed to be the ones who, I dunno, were brought to orgasm more easily," she said. "What am I doing wrong?"

He swallowed audibly. "Nothing."

The hand that had been in her hair, on her cheek, was nowhere to be found now. Beneath Rey’s ear, his heart was racing.

"So what do we do? Just keep going?"

Ben’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. A tremor came over him – Rey wouldn’t have noticed it if she weren’t plastered all over his chest – and didn’t go away. She opened her own mouth, but no sound came out of that either.

What were they doing? How in the Force’s name had they let it get this far? Why hadn’t they, before they started, why hadn’t they...

His cock never having left her, Rey pushed herself upright and started rocking her hips again. Ben resolutely refused to look at her.

 _Is being fucked by me really so awful?_ she couldn’t help but think. She pumped herself up and down his girth, throbbing and sensitive, much closer and infinitely further from satisfaction than before. _Can you really not find any silver lining to this?_

Up and down, up and down she pumped, her orgasm having left her sopping, squelching wet. Even when she had nothing but her fingers, once had never been enough. Now, with the aphrodisiac singing through her nervous system and a cock that felt like it was made just to fit her filling her to the brim, the need for another orgasm was an aching hunger.

Trembling from the pit of her stomach to the tips of her fingers, Rey reached for Ben’s face.

He shook her off, a sharp shake of his head.

"Ben?"

She lifted herself off and let herself drop down on his cock. His eyebrows drew together; he refused to look at her.

"Ben?"

_Am I really hurting you badly enough that the king of inner conflict suddenly has only one way to feel about this?_

Up and down, up and down, up and down.

"Ben, please look at me."

Up and down. Drag and push. He closed his eyes and flung an arm over his face. Up and down. Drag and push.

"Ben –"

"Please shut up and get it over with."

Her hips stilled. A tear fell onto his chest.

Ben jerked as if burned. He finally looked up, face lined with shock.

"Dammit Ben, why aren’t you doing anything?!" she sobbed. Even the contractions that came with her crying felt divine, and she wanted to scream.

His hands rose and fell and clenched and unclenched helplessly, his mouth opening and closing.

"I thought you wanted me! I thought you _loved_ me, loved me more than the Darkness could handle or destroy, and that someday the two of us would win and everything would finally be alright. So why are you – why aren’t you –"

At long last, he grabbed her wrists. The agonized tightness of his grip was the only thing grounding her. The only thing distracting her from how deeply his cock was buried inside of her, and how good it felt, and how she couldn’t stop spasming around it, and how wrong it was.

"Rey..." He groaned. "I’ve done so many monstrous things in my life, I don’t know if the man you want me to be will survive any more. I can’t hurt you." His lip trembled. His hands trembled. His eyes were so dark and so wet. "Not again. Not like this."

He was so much better than he let himself be, and yet _so useless_. She couldn’t even muster up the appropriate anger. Just tears.

"Oh, and you think I can just hurt you like it’s nothing? Stop feeling sorry for yourself and help me!"

His mouth fell open. "For once I’m trying to do the right thing, and I’m feeling sorry for myself?"

"Well, you’re doing a marvelous job at helping and _not_ feeling sorry for yourself!" she snapped.

"Yes, it’s always my fault, isn’t it?" he said with a razor-edged calm. "It’s a perk of choosing the Dark Side. Every Lightsider in the galaxy gets to look at you and say to themselves, ‘well, unlike me he _asked_ for it, so –’"

This time, Rey was the one hiding her eyes.

"Stop," she gasped between sobs. "Stop. This isn’t helping. Of course it’s not your fault, I just – I just..."

Suddenly his hands were around her waist and he was lifting her up. All the way off his cock. He set her down astride his thighs, gasping and bereft and relieved in a way she couldn’t articulate, and then pulled her close. His cock was trapped between them, useless, ignored. He just wrapped his arms around her, enveloping her, squeezing her. Comforting her.

"It’s not yours either," he said, and she could feel it rumble in his chest. "I’m sorry. I’m sorry."

Rey clutched at his back, crying harder, and he rocked her, or maybe she rocked him.

"Shhhhhh," he murmured again and again, in one way or another, as he let her unload. "I’m here, I’m sorry. It’ll be alright. I’ve got you."

Slowly she went boneless in his grip, from relief and exhaustion. He rubbed her back soothingly. How long had she been yearning for that?

"Shhh, shhh..."

Eventually, she laughed. "And here you keep claiming there’s no Light left in you."

He grunted. "This doesn’t count –"

"Oh, shush. It all makes sense now. Of course it looks like the Darkness is all you have, if you can’t see the light for what it is."

He wisely decided not to protest that.

They disentangled so Rey could dry her face and Ben could dry all the parts of him she’d wiped her eyes and nose on. With the sheet clutched in his hand, he looked down at his groin; at his erection, still unflagging, and her slick, still glistening all up and down its length. Rey stared with him.

They still hadn’t fulfilled the Emperor’s command. Seed.

The thought of climbing on again was... complicated. She ran a fingertip from the root to the tip and watched it jump. Ben made a choked noise in the back of his throat.

"Do you really want me to...?" he started, but didn’t finish.

Did they have a choice?

But also: did that have to matter?

"My legs are tired," she quipped, but quickly sobered. She asked: "Do you think it was monstrous of me to take charge?"

"No."

Part of her did. But if Ben could say that after suffering through it as poorly as he had, maybe Rey could silence that part of herself.

"So why would it be monstrous of you to help?"

"I’d hurt you," he answered, all calm, sad resignation. "All I know how to do is destroy and defile."

"No you wouldn’t. No you don’t. This isn’t how I’d imagined it happening while you were gone, but..." Closing her eyes, she leaned her brow against his shoulder. "Most of the important parts are the same."

"What parts?" he whispered. "Say what you mean for once."

"You, doing your best to be kind."

For a long moment, the silence following that statement was all there was. Then he let out a shuddering breath and said, "Okay."

Cupping her face in both hands, he tilted her head up and leaned in for a kiss. It was sloppy and messy and Rey didn’t know how to fix it any more than he did, but it was _right_. It was how all of this should have started.

She laid herself down and he climbed over her, determined, if fumbling. It took both of them to guide his cock inside her. Perhaps that was for the best. Them working together, instead of letting Palpatine’s commands drive them apart. She told him that, and insisted: "Silver lining."

One corner of his mouth ticked up a wry fraction. "I wasn’t aware we ever had a together."

"First Order mail services suck, then. Got it." She curled her hand around his neck, every nerve in her body thrumming. "You can move now, you know."

Gnawing on the insides of his cheeks, he obeyed. The rocking of his hips was gentler than her bouncing had been. He was trying to give her what she wanted; trying to be kind. The knot in her stomach undid itself, over and over it seemed, with every thrust. She wrapped her legs around his waist, let him set the pace, guided his fingers to her clit, and let herself drift in a warm, sweaty sea of pleasure and orgasm and post-orgasm and next-orgasm and pleasure and the look on Ben’s face as he drank in the look on hers, until finally his breath stuttered, his head dropped, and his hips stilled as the warm flush of his seed bloomed deep in her belly.

He cried quietly onto her shoulder afterward. She stroked his hair with both hands.

"Shhh, it’s alright."

"Nothing about this is alright."

"You are. I am. Enough of it is."

"I know – I know _that_. I don’t know why I’m..."

Tears gathered in Rey’s own eyes. "Shhh. That’s alright too."

He rolled aside, slowly softening cock leaving her, and gathered her into his arms. They held each other for a long time. Feeling without speaking, doing nothing but being together, until eventually they freshened up, changed the sheets, and fell asleep next to each other.

In the morning, Ben’s face was the first thing Rey saw, and the only thing that made waking up bearable.

That day and the next. And the next, and the next, and the next.

 

Rey’s snide "wrong time of the month" hadn’t been a serious answer to Palpatine’s question, but it hadn’t been a lie either. Which means they had to fuck, futilely, for weeks before there was much of a chance of them conceiving. And once the chance had passed, they had to fuck futilely every night before they got good odds again.

They made the best of it. Together, because that was all they had; each other, and the hope that they would find a way out or be rescued before all that seed took and a child was born.

"Palpatine knows we’re defying his plans and banding together against him," Ben murmured, his fingertips ghosting along her back even as his thoughts fell to darker and darker places. "He won’t let our understanding go undisturbed."

"He can try," Rey countered.

"I’m not trying to be a pessimist, but we have to be prepared. The Dark Side doesn’t let you be _okay_. How we’re doing right now – it can’t last. Palpatine won’t let it."

She sighed and burrowed her face in his shoulder. "I know. But if this is all I’m going to get of you, let me have it while I have it."

He didn’t say anything, just held her to him so tightly the nebulae of their crushed bodies would have coalesced into one, if only the universe were as kind as they endeavored to be to each other.

They got better at the sex. It gradually started coming easier to them. With nothing to do but either try to escape one more time or talk and indulge in idle entertainment together, they got better at each other too.

Some days, after too many days of furtively counting the days, Rey would catch herself staring into the middle distance in the sitting room, which naturally had Ben in it, and focusing her eyes on the juncture of his legs, on the bulge of the cock she knew lay hidden there. She’d catch herself wanting to climb into his lap and sink down and ride him. Not because it was evening and Palpatine had decreed it that way, but because she wanted to and she could, and she knew from the look in his eyes he felt the same way. Wanted her the same way she wanted him.

She wanted his face to be the first thing she saw every morning, and the sounds of their as yet non-existent child the first thing she heard. She wanted to fuck him twice a day without having to tell herself no, that’ll just increase the odds of falling pregnant, and have him without having to fight the feeling of being hunted and dirty and used and like a user for it.

 

Rey was in the ’fresher, putting her hair up for the day, when she first realized. A hair band disappeared to parts unknown as her hands flew to her belly and her mind turned inward, toward something she’d come to think she’d never feel again and something she hadn’t, until now, truly thought she would ever feel.

"Ben!" she cried.

He was there in a flash, worry written all over his face.

"Look! No, see – no, I mean –" She grabbed his hands and put them on her belly. "Can you feel it?"

His expression cycled from confusion to elation to heartbreak, a perfect mirror to her own feelings. He knelt before her, unshed tears hanging precariously between his lashes, lost for words.

"I can _feel_ her," Rey managed in a watery voice.

Ben spread his long fingers to cover more of her belly, but did not confirm that he could sense the baby’s presence too. It saddened her in more ways than Rey could begin to name.

"So Palpatine gets his wish," Ben eventually said. "A child with your power and my bloodline, born from dark deeds, raised in the dark, never to taste the light."

His kneeling looked less like worship and more like defeat. Rey lowered and draped herself across him in such a way that he had no choice but to hold onto her.

With her face buried in his hair, she said: "No. The light finds you through even the smallest cracks. And if she gets literally anything from you –"

"If the light ever finds her, that’ll be all you."

"We’ll split the difference and agree to disagree." She drew back to look him in the eye. "But I don’t think he’ll ever have her all to himself either way. I can sense her. Despite whatever it is that’s kept us from the Force all this time. I don’t think the bond I have with her can ever be broken."

"Really," he said, painfully evenly.

"I don’t think the bond _any_ Force-strong parent has to their child can ever be broken."

Ben’s face was doing the most curious thing. "I wish I could share your optimism."

"So do I." Rey wondered if she’d ever seen him smile. She cupped his cheek. "Ben, please. You have to have a little faith of your own. I can’t have it all for you and I can’t do it all by myself. I need you."

His eyes drifted down to her abdomen. Despondent wouldn’t begin to describe his expression. She’d come to expect that – beneath all the Darkness and anger and fear and aggression, what Ben Solo truly seemed to be at his essence was inexhaustibly _sad_ – but then he took a deep breath and looked up.

"Okay. Alright then. I will."

 

They made love that night. Hesitantly, in fits and starts, but better than anything they’d done before, because it wasn’t under threat of death or worse, it was for themselves and between themselves and nothing else. It was sorrow and hope and need and love. It was goodbye, and on some level they both knew it.

Because Palpatine walked in the door less than half an hour later with a contingent of red-robed guards.

"Well done, my children," he drawled, looking from one to the other where they sat on the edge of the bed in their nightclothes, their hands clasped. "Well done indeed. I knew you’d learn."

He motioned, and the guards grabbed Rey. They forced her up and away, tearing her hand from Ben’s. He jumped up, rage and fear lighting up his features, but more guards immobilized him.

"Remember!" Rey yelled as she was forcibly led from the room with the electrified walls she’d come to see as home. "Don’t lose hope!"

"I won’t. Wait for me. We’ll see each other again," Ben grunted around the red-armored arm hooked around his windpipe.

"Yes you will," Palpatine said. "You two conceived so fast – I wonder if you can do that a second time."

Ben’s eyes and Palpatine’s laughter followed Rey all the way to her new prison. It was filled with medical equipment and droids, and when she woke up after her first night there, the first, last, and every other thing she saw in between was reminders of her loneliness.

She buried her face in her pillow and forced herself to heed her own advice.

 

One night, when Rey was fat and heavy with the child, she dreamt she woke up next to Ben again. They were free and healthy and whole, except for the awful cramp that had roused dream-Rey from her dream-sleep. She didn’t have to shake Ben awake; he’d already sensed it.

He was never far as she gave birth to their daughter, or after, while the medidroids examined the infant and took care of Rey, and then, cleaned and vetted, handed her her baby for the first time. Her eyes drooped and though she wanted to feel nothing else for the rest of her life but the weight of her very own child in her arms, she hadn’t the strength left to hold her. So, reluctantly, she handed her back to the delivery droid. And the droid turned to Ben.

Ben didn’t take her.

"Rey. If you’re going to send me away –" His voice broke on the words, and for a moment he sounded very young; like a little boy who felt as if his mother and father no longer wanted him in their home. "– now’s the time. If you let me hold her, I’m not letting either of you go ever again."

Not ever? No more counting the days until someone would come for her? No more hands torn from hers ever again? Rey liked the sound of that.

"Take her, Ben."

Ben took her. And when dream-Rey fell asleep, he was there again when she dream-woke, the sun rising across his tear-stained face and irrepressible grin. Then and every time after.

 

When Rey really woke, she was alone. And the thing that had roused her was the sound of explosions in the distance.


End file.
